“Is it ‘speculate on the book’ time?! I love ‘speculate on the book’ time!”

This week Abi, Jamie and Anthony use a review of McCabe and Mrs Miller as a flimsy excuse to talk about M*A*S*H again to annoy Rich because they’re both directed by Robert Altman. Along the way we argue about hats and coats (as usual) and which dead animal their made out of, as well as the different American and British terms for hangover cures and naughty gamblers. Come join us around the red tablecloth now!

Footnote: The coat was seal, the hat was velour and the guy in Ratatouille is called Linguine. Peace!

Milquetoast – a very timid, unassertive, spineless person, especially one who is easily dominated or intimidated… aka Sylvester Stallone’s character in this movie. Listen in as Rich gets oddly Yiddish with his vernacular and Abi and Anthony struggle to get a word in edgewise about this infamous 90s actioner as well as offering up the chilling reminder that many of us still have mums out there that might be embarrassing us right now to total strangers. <shudder>

This week, Jamie brought us Strange Brew (The Adventures of Bob and Doug McKenzie), a Canadian drunk comedy from 1983 with a plot that defies understanding or even description. (Oh, how we tried.) After an opening salvo of dodgy Canadian impersonations by the males of SFFCH (Abi, being of Canadian heritage, chose not to participate) everyone concerned gets down to the knotty business of trying to understand comedy that was meant for an audience in a time and a place so very remote from SFFCH HQ with mixed results. But who liked what and why? Listen now to find out.

This week we all decided to see what all the fuss was about and watch Xanadu, a film that purports to be about a muse coming down to earth to inspire an artist to enter into a partnership with a retired band-leader and open a nightclub but is actually about nothing at all and is very upsetting for all concerned. Listen as Rich, Abi, Anthony and especially Jamie unravel as they try to get to grips with the assault on the eyes and ears that is Xanadu.

Adam Sandler is…an acquired taste. Like liquorice or mouldy cheese. So how will our filmic taste buds react to Abi’s choice of 2009 action comedy You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, where he plays an Israeli counter-terrorist with ambitions of becoming a hairdresser. It is certainly an eyebrow-raising concept with some unexpectedly political comments, but can the more jaded among us still be won over by Sandler’s shtick? So, better make sure you have tons of hummus on hand, crank up your Mariah Carey and come and listen to us discuss unexplained levitating villains, excessive crotch-thrusting, literal fire-fighting and so many stereotypes that we don’t really understand.

We dive into our oldest film review this week with Rich’s choice of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ from all the way back in 1932. Now, we are all aware of the very iconic Laurel and Hardy, but how much do we really know about their work? ‘Turns out not very much past their short films. (Did you know they wore blue and yellow jackets?) Will we be able to handle them in a feature length dose where we find them drafted into the army and also bringing up an orphan child? Join Rich Abi and Ant this time as they ponder the out of date comedy references, reminisce about the old Laurel and Hardy cartoon and really learn that comedy and tragedy are intertwined, with such themes up for discussion as domestic abuse, child abduction and good men dying in war.

Before The Lord of the Rings movies made them kind of legitimate, fantasy films were well weird. Especially in the 80’s and especially in Jamie’s choice of 1985’s Legend, directed by Ridley Scott. Now we all have a general respect for Scott’s movies here at Spoiler Filled, but this one really takes the biscuit. But what should we have expected from a film with such a troubled history, with several different versions out there with different soundtracks. We all tried to watch the original theatrical cut, but it seems we all ended up watching different things. None of which made any sense. Not even Tim Curry, as spectacular as he is, can save this film, but my god did he try. If you can bring yourself to face it, come and listen to us complain about: weird marriage rituals, the lack of rules, Tom Cruise squatting too much, why anyone, even the bloody devil, would want to marry the princess and why our favourite character is dispatched obscenely quickly.

We decided long ago that one of Spoiler Filled’s collective favourite directors, Quentin Tarantino, was not suitable for the general mediocrity/obscurity we deal with here on SFFCH. So how do we find a way to sneakily talk about his work? Well, we look to his 70’s influences of course with this week’s choice of Charley Varrick from 1973. Directed by legendary 70’s crime filmmaker Don Siegel, the film stars scamp-y curmudgeon Walter Matthau in a dramatic action role, something a few of us here are not used to. Will Ant, Abi and Rich be won over by Matthau’s darker side? Come listen to us ramble to find out about this and also: Matthau’s surprising attractiveness to the ladies in this film, having an older leading man in a action-crime-thriller, convoluted stunt-plane antics and underground ping-pong dens.

Another sports movie?! What is going on with the Spoiler Filled crew?! Extreme sitting and extensive reviewing is usually the only kind of sport we all engage in. So let’s see, we’ve done soccer, wrestling and even touched upon basketball. This time it’s the turn of high-school American football to be scrutinized in Abi’s choice of Wildcats from 1986. Goldie Hawn has been somewhat absent from cinema in the last decade or so, but she was everywhere in the 70s and 80s. Here she plays a girl’s track teacher with aspirations of coaching high-school football. When she finally gets her chance at a tough, inner-city school, she has to fend off the boisterousness of her team, the chauvinism of a rival coach and the whiny interfering of her ex-husband.
In this show we enjoy the diversity, the characters, little kids aggressively swearing and we are appalled by probably the worst rap song ever made.